According to recently released research from the Pew Center, we’re just as optimistic about the web as we were ten years ago during the Internet’s first boom cycle.
At the end of 2009, most Americans in this Pew survey have a dismal view of the 2000s. Between the Iraq war, the 9/11 attacks, economic and political distress and the curse of reality television, the decade has been voted the worst in our collective memory. But one of few bright spots in a tense ten-year period was and remains technological innovation, including the Internet, cell phones and email. Social sites, however, still have a way to go in the public eye.
Over a five-day period, the Pew Center interviewed 1,504 American adults and asked them to weigh their feelings about culture and technology over time. The respondents’ answers are enlightening.
While positive feelings outweigh negative ones for almost every cultural epoch from 1960 until 1999, our feelings about the 2000s are predominantly unhappy. Fully 50 percent of respondents have an overall negative impression of the past decade, while only 27 percent said they felt positively about these years.
However, almost across the board, technological advances in basic online and mobile communication tools have been a bright spot in our shared perception of this decade’s progressions and events.
Cell phones, email and the Internet were viewed very favorably among all types of Americans, and online shopping and smartphones evoked positive reactions from a majority of respondents, as well. Blogs and the social web, however, earned a solid “meh” from those surveyed.
It is worth noting that the greater a respondent’s age, the less likely he or she was to view these technological changes positively. For example, 45 percent of folks between the ages of 18 and 49 – a huge demographic – saw social networking websites as having positive effects on our society. But after the 50-years-old mark, that percentage lowered significantly to between 25 and 21 percent.
It’s also interesting to note that the dot-com crash hasn’t effected our late-nineties optimism about where the Internet would take us. Most of us still feel, as we did in 1999, that the Internet is having an overall positive effect on Americans.
Again, these responses were subject to age. Around three-quarters of younger respondents saw the web as a positive change, but only 42 percent of people age 65 and older felt the same way. But these older Americans didn’t seem to think the Internet was necessarily negative, either. Their responses indicated that they were unsure of its impact or thought its influence was negligible. Another correlation in this opinion was between a positive view of the Internet and a college education. A full 82 percent of folks with a college degree said the web is doing good things for America.
For more details, read the full study, and do let us know in the comments what you think of the 2000s and where the Internet will take us in the 2010s.
